Burns was born into a world undergoing rapid transformation. Changed agrarian conditions meant that landlords were increasingly pursuing profit from farming and their tenant farmers were being forced to take larger, less certain leases to pursue increased productivity. The poet’s father, William, came close to bankruptcy under these conditions and his own farming career was a financially precarious affair (these are the situations that underpin the allegorical sketch that is ‘To a Mouse’). Burns thought of emigrating to the West Indies before the success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect allowed him a brief alternative life as a literary celebrity in Edinburgh and elsewhere furth of his native Ayrshire. His resulting peregrinations in the borders and the highlands allowed him to pursue an increasingly obsessive role of song collector, an activity where his catholic tastes were again to the fore as he assembled a wide portfolio of songs of love, patriotism, labour, Jacobitism and bawdry. On his initial acceptance beyond his own region, Burns had also escaped a rather complicated personal life where he had fathered several illegitimate children and had been publicly censured by the kirk. Eventually, by 1788 Burns was employed by the Excise service and farmed part-time, enabling him to marry one of his early lovers, Jean Armour. Burns though remained something of a libertarian throughout his life (and by the end had fathered at least thirteen children by at least five women).

Burns’s poetic attitude to sex declared it a matter for female as well as male enjoyment (see, for instance, ‘O Saw Ye My Maggie’) and as one of the great and sacred human pleasures in the face of the fabricated fuss of ‘civilization’ in the case of religion, politics and war (see ‘The Holy Fair’, or ‘Why Shouldna Poor Folk Mowe’). Burns at his most dissenting was sceptical about the much-vaunted ‘progress’ of contemporary society (see, for example, ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’, where advances in medicine – often used for nefarious purposes – have the old allegorical figure of Death repine that humans are usurping his traditional function). Burns knew the darker side of humanity (the philosophic under-felt of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is that the demons are not so much out there, as to be found rather in the imagination, not to mention the acts, of mankind). A supporter both of the American and French Revolutions, Burns had to be circumspect, most especially since by the time of the latter he was in the employ of the crown. His ‘Scots Wha Hae’ may ostensibly be about the fourteenth-century wars of independence between England and Scotland, but it has a resonance with the more contemporary struggles against ‘tyranny’ to be found among those inspired by the democratic spirit unleashed by the French Revolution. Like others, it may be that he became, in time, rather disillusioned with the altered direction of the French cause (see ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?’), but Burns’s dissent at its best, in any case, runs much deeper than the politics of states. His ‘The Jolly Beggars – a Cantata’ is Burns’s most iconoclastic performance, in which the cumulative vision is one that sees the dearest emotional and physical pleasures of humanity as little recognized by any man-made social or political system. In his scepticism towards such ‘civilized’ fabric, Burns shows himself a great artist, helping usher in the new Romantic age and even the modern world with all its scepticism, as we know it today.